Preorders for my next novel, Every Room a Hunger are now open! Signed copies available through Astoria Bookshop.

I really wish I was the type of person who worked on a single project and then finished it. Instead, I am here bearing the half-formed fruits of five different unfinished projects, while also celebrating the one thing I did conquer.

1) Queer Folk Horror: A Manifesto Manifestation (zine)

Queers are supposed to be creatures of cities. Either from the assumption that cities are havens of liberal tolerance (though every city queer will tell you that’s complicated), or from the suspicion that cities are where all the manifestations of modern godless existence gather: queers, sex workers, single parents, immigrants, everything that made H.P. Lovecraft break out into a cold sweat when he made the mistake of wandering through Brooklyn.

2) How to Read More (and Actually Enjoy It) (interactive zine)

The benefits of reading are many and frequently extolled. It develops empathy, imagination, and emotional intelligence. It has correlations to academic achievement, career development, and even civic engagement. Researchers credit it with better health, reduced stress, better sleep, and reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression. I have to be honest, though: I’d like reading even if it wasn’t good for me. Reading is a pleasurable act, but pleasure is a suspect motivation, so we’re forced to dress it in the boring language of personal development (barf).

3) untitled queer bookstore versus the demon apocalypse novel (book-length fiction)

When Maggie started lurking at Ourland Books, an alcoholic nineteen-year-old haunting the open mics, she’d been dazzled by the tough old dykes that held court. Every wrinkle and gray hair seemed like a poem in motion, an ode to surviving in the dog-eat-man-eat-woman world. She never thought she’d make it past thirty, so she looked at the older coterie of lesbians with a kind of hunger that mixed desire with existential dread. Despite her best efforts, she’d made it to thirty, then forty, and then out of the blue, some twee little lesbian with an armful of Mary Oliver unironically called her a “queer elder.”
And Maggie realized that she was right. What the fuck.

4) untitled short story about wizard landlords

Little Wizardly was a weird neighborhood, even by NYC weirdness standards. The towers studded the streets, at odds with Manhattan’s strict street grid, made with a blue-gray concrete that reminded Fern of mold on an orange. She couldn’t quite settle on a metaphor for what they looked like. Fingernail clippings? Polypeptide models? Xylophagus fungi? All of the above? They adhered to the 5-over-1 model, but instead of a laundromat or physical therapy clinic, nearly every one that Fern passed was a smoothie shop. Wizards gathered in clusters outside of them, staring at Fern as she wheeled her two enormous rolling suitcases past under the burning sun.

5) “Something Is Wrong Here” (meta-horror short story)

The game is called “Something is wrong here” and it works like this.
Step one: Pull up a random image from Google Street View. Other random pictures are fine, but a machine’s utilitarian anti-aesthetic makes it feel realer: the stretch of beach in Chile, the field with electrical towers in England, the windswept trees and red dirt in Western Australia, how sharply they contrast against the blue sky. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes evocative, but only ever accidentally. The mundanity is the point.
Step two: Tell your assembled audience that something is wrong here. Something bad has happened, or is happening.
Step three: Tell the story of what that bad thing is.

1) How to Recommend a Book (and how to ask for recommendations from others)

I finally finished making my How To Recommend a Book zine, after no less than 3 false starts.

Here’s an excerpt of the zine, plus a sneak peek inside.

Someone came into the bookstore where I work and spent awhile looking through our fiction shelves. Eventually, she came up to the register and asked if we had a specific book. I looked it up: we didn’t have it, but we could order it for her.

No, she told us. She was sure we had the book. I double-checked, but we didn’t. Not only that, it was a title we’d never even had on our shelves.

“But Chat GPT says you have it,” she said, visibly confused. She had taken pictures of our shelves, uploaded them to the large language model, and then asked it to recommend her a book based on her previous reading history.

You can buy a copy here, either on its on own or in a bundle with my other zines. I also just made a quarterly zine/snail mail tier on Patreon. Use the code SNAILMAIL if you want 50% off the first month. (And hey, if you don’t want mail but still want to make sure I can keep paying for groceries and health insurance, consider tossing me a couple bucks there or on Ko-fi.)

And hey, if one of the WIP excerpts especially strikes your fancy, let me know? I can always use the encouragement to finish something.

<3

Nino